By Reka Solymosi, University of Manchester. In April 2018, I was given the opportunity to explore the world of Civic Tech, through participating in TICTec2018, a conference for practitioners, commentators, academics, and funders of civic technologies.

By Vasilios Mavroudis and Petr Svenda. This is the story of the most popular execution environment, its shortcomings, and how open source and hacking saved the day.According to recent revelations, the MINIX operating system is embedded in the Management Engine of all Intel CPUs released after 2015. A side-effect of this is that MINIX became known as the most widespread operating system in the world almost overnight. However, in the last decade another tiny OS has silently pushed itself into even more devices around the world while remaining unknown to most: JavaCard.

On 24 May 2018, Maria Cruz, Shalini Kurapati, and Yasemin Türkyilmaz-van der Velden led a workshop titled “Software Reproducibility: How to put it into practice?”, as part of the event Towards cultural change in data management – data stewardship in practice held at TU Delft, the Netherlands. There were 17 workshop participants, including researchers, data stewards, and research software engineers. Here we describe the rationale of the workshop, what happened on the day, key discussions and insights, and suggested next steps.

By Mark Woodbridge, Research Software Engineering Team Lead at Imperial College.
In our previous two posts we described two ways of deploying web applications to Azure: firstly using a Virtual Machine in place of an on-premise server, and then using the App Service to run a Docker container. The former provides a means of provisioning an arbitrary machine much more rapidly that would traditionally be possible, and the latter gives us a seamless route from development to production – greatly reducing the burden of long-term maintenance and monitoring.

By Mark Woodbridge, Research Software Engineer group lead at Imperial College London.

This is the second in a series of posts describing activities funded by our RSE Cloud Computing Award. We are exploring the use of selected Microsoft Azure services to accelerate the delivery of RSE projects via a cloud-first approach.

By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute, Aleksandra Nenadic, Software Sustainability Institute, Mario Antonioletti, Software Sustainability Institute.
After six years of working and communicating with The Carpentries’ staff and community via email and various video conferencing tools at all sorts of early or late hours, we finally met them face-to-face for the very first time at CarpentryCon 2018. It was all very exciting!

By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute.
We know that seven out of ten UK researchers reported that their work would be impossible without software, but, sometimes when attending domain specific conferences, we still get surprised at the importance of software in research. On June 2018, I attended Measuring Behavior 2018 by invitation of our fellow Robyn Grant.

By Reka Solymosi, University of Manchester.
After our Brexit Data Challenge Hackathon our paper got shortlisted to be presented at the 2018 GISRUK conference. While I was unable to attend, two members of the hackathon team, Heather Robinson and Sam Langton went to represent our group. This is a guest blog of sorts by them on their experience on presenting our paper and the event in general.